An inclination, according to dictionary.com, is
“a disposition or bent, especially of the mind or will; a liking or preference”
“a tendency toward a certain condition, action.”
Our inclinations may not be discernible, even to us, until times of pressure and duress bring them to the fore. Crisis and trial, I have observed, cause people to react in three ways:
flee forward, retreat backward or freeze.
Fleeing is a reaction I know very well, as it is my personal trademark.
Every time life or people have pushed back at me, my sole goal was to get out of Dodge, and it didn’t matter where. Paducah Kansas was as good as Monaco because being there got me out being held captive to my issues here.
Sometimes I was able to physically leave a place, only to find, as we all objectively know or ought to know by now, that the problems I thought would be solved by my fleeing had also packed their bags and tagged along, or morphed into an entirely different animal!
So there I was, unpacking my life in my new place, when out came the boogey men of the past to claim the spare bedroom!
It’s like Luke Skywalker trying to shake the bad guys in the famous “trench run” scene. They come out of nowhere and find you. And so for me, that always led to even more flight from the here and now, oftentimes with guns blazing at the enemy in return! (otherwise known as burning bridges).
A totally opposite way of assuaging adversity is through retreat.
Here, looking into the rearview mirror, we go back to what we know because living in this new unexpected is too much. We can’t or don’t know how to accept the new normal so we run to the old: old friends, old hometowns, old careers and jobs. We lop off the possibilities of the future by retreating into the past, because the past is what we know.
It’s interesting that forward fleers take flight because they want to get away from what they know to the unknown, while retreaters retreat because they want to get away from the unknown to the known.
And finally, juxtaposed, are the freezers, those who cannot decide one way or another which way to go. Freezers don’t flee; they don’t retreat; they just don’t.
Freezers are the proverbial “deer in the headlights.” They immobilize themselves in their present situation—not in denial but in full awareness of it—doing nothing, resigned.
I believe that in each of these cases:
the retreaters step back—not out of true nostalgia;
the fleers run—not out of a motivation of sincere seeking;
and freezers stand still—not out of a commitment to overcoming and making things work;
but out of fear that we cannot, or do not want to be, the person our adversity is attempting to turn us into.
We don’t want to face the daunting task of looking inward so that we can for once stop taking our problems with us.
We don’t want to face having to grow new skills, new friends, new purpose.
Retreaters hope the past will sweep in and save them; fleers hope the new location will be their refuge, and freezers hope to just get through today and that’ll be enough.
All of this points to motivation.
In all three cases, avoidance is what we’re truly after. That is our motivation. We are Jonah, and our retreat, flight or remaining frozen is the city of Tarshish which Jonah chose to go to instead of the city of Nineva, where God had sent him.
Jonah reacted to himself rather than respond to God.
And what did God do?
He had Johah thrown off a boat, and then He sent a whale to swallow him up.
Which is exactly what God will carry out in us.
It isn’t wrong to “go back.” It isn’t wrong to “go forward.” It isn’t wrong to “stay put.” What’s wrong is the motivation behind it if it is a motivation to evade.
And what we are evading, we discover—as did Jonah—is God’s attempt to mature us.
Maturity is that process of iron sharpening iron. It can happen with another person, but it can also happen between us and God, the same as it did between Jacob and God in Genesis 32.
This is the process that takes us from complacency to contentment, come what may.
Complaceny says “Ah, I can kick back” and not really think too hard, as long as everything is going well or even just so-so.
But when the creek, indeed, does rise to alarming levels, threatening to flood and drown us, or God asks us to do something difficult that we certainly did not sign up for, complacency does not float: it sinks to the very bottom, taking us with it.
Contentment, on the other hand, says “I can be content in all situations…” (Philippians 4:11-13). It rises to the occasion.
Contentment derives from God: only He can instill it. That is what carries us afloat, on the Ark of the storm.
It is in that right motivation of Godly contentment—a contentment fashioned in us as we work with Him through the very distress we are so inclined to shortcut—that we persevere and finally find clarity of direction: whether it means staying put in God’s active waiting, going back to a time and place in history at His call, or setting out for a new island guided by the dove of God’s hope.
Copyright Barb Harwood
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